It’s a wrap: News this week (Dec 16 – Dec 22)

There have been multiple developments this week on the tech front. From telecommunication bill to HCLTech ransomware attack, this is the list of the most important developments for a quick catch-up:

HCLTech suffers ransomware attack

IT services company HCL Technologies suffered a ransomware attack in one of its projects. In a regulatory filing on Wednesday, the company said that the incident happened in an isolated cloud environment and that there was ‘no impact observed’ on the overall HCLTech network.

“Cybersecurity and data protection is a top priority for HCLTech. A detailed investigation is underway in consultation with relevant stakeholders to assess the root cause and take remedial action as necessary,” HCLTech said in a statement. 

ONDC-Meta partnership

Meta and Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) on Tuesday partnered to help small businesses in India build seamless conversational buyer and seller experiences on WhatsApp through Meta’s business and technical solution providers. Meanwhile, ONDC will help these business solution providers become seller apps, bringing the businesses they service onto the ONDC Network and helping them drive commerce. 

CtrlS’ new datacenter

Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendrabhai Patel on Friday inaugurated CtrlS Datacenters Ltd's new data center in GIFT City, Gujarat. The company plans to invest over ₹250 crore, creating more than 1,000 direct and indirect jobs, in phases. In October, CtrlS announced its plan to invest $2 billion over the next six years to scale its operations and expand its business. Further, in November, CtrlS Datacenters signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Uttarakhand government to invest ₹250 crore in establishing a greenfield Edge data centre with a capacity of 10 MW over the next 8-10 years. 

IBM’s new acquisition

IBM announced on Monday that it will purchase Software AG's enterprise technology platforms for 2.13 billion euros ($2.33 billion) in order to enhance its artificial intelligence (AI) and hybrid cloud offerings. The acquisition will be made using IBM's available cash on hand and will include Software AG's StreamSets and webMethods platforms.

New telecomunication bill

This week, both houses of Parliament cleared the Telecommunications Bill, 2023 to reform the country's century-old telecom law, replacing the Indian Telegraph Act, of 1885, the Wireless Telegraphy Act (1933), and the Telegraph Wires (Unlawful Possession) Act (1950). Some of the highlights of the bill include amendments to the expansion and operation of telecommunication services; assignment of spectrum; development of new technologies; and provision for the government to assume temporary possession of telecom service in the public interest, among others. 

Tech Mahindra’s Project Indus

CP Gurnani, the outgoing chief of IT services major Tech Mahindra, tweeted on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that the generative artificial intelligence project Indus has been ‘successfully completed’ and has been already launched in beta phase within the company by its innovation unit called the Makers Lab. Project Indus currently has a Hindi LLM with 539 million parameters and 10 billion tokens; it has been trained on almost 114 GB of Wikipedia, news data, and book corpora, which we collected over the first three months and then cleaned, annotated, and translated. In related news, Gurnani left the company after 19 years of service.